


Pretty Girls Are Always Lonely

by TwinIvoryElephants



Category: Gone Series - Michael Grant
Genre: Internalized Misogyny, Pre-Canon, Slice of Life, but also hates girls, diana is frustrated with life basically, diana wishes she had female friends, it's a conundrum
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-09
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:14:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26915707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TwinIvoryElephants/pseuds/TwinIvoryElephants
Summary: A small peek into Diana's life pre-FAYZ.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	Pretty Girls Are Always Lonely

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dianasbaby](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dianasbaby/gifts).



> This fic was inspired by dianasbaby's fic "Diana: Retrospection." I'd highly recommend it!

Diana stood in the aisle, staring blankly at the multicolored pastel packages of maxi pads. Her hair was held back with a headband that matched the tint of her lip gloss, and she’d hitched up the plaid skirt of her uniform so it showed off significantly more leg than the puritanical Coates staff would ever allow. The zits dotting her forehead and chin were carefully brushed over with concealer, her deep brown eyes highlighted by artfully applied mascara. She stood in a practiced way—one knee bent forward, the other leg stiff and held slightly back—provocative and coy in a way that looked effortless. She could easily imagine male passersby’s eyes being attracted by the prettiness of her legs, the way her painted thumbnail pressed slightly into her bottom lip, the associations their minds made with the plaid skirt of her Coates uniform. It was easy to forget, Diana mused, that she was currently looking at the unsexiest feminine product ever to exist.

“Diana— _hello_?”

Diana blinked, coming out of her reverie. Staci Holbrook, a gangly, pasty sophomore with too much eyeshadow, was standing beside her expectantly. She’d changed out of her uniform before coming along on the grocery run. Now, she wore a peach-colored sundress that, in Diana’s semi-professional opinion, made her seem even pastier than usual. 

“I’m coming,” she snapped. She grabbed a pack of pink pads off the shelf and dropped it into Staci’s basket, which was already filled with miscellaneous items—mini Oreos, nail polish, Red Vines, mascara, et cetera. Most of them weren’t hers. Diana hadn’t even really wanted to come when Staci, who was in her last period English class, asked her in her overdone, I-could-care-less sort of way. She’d accompanied her in the school’s dumpy little campus van mainly because she wanted to get away from Coates for a bit, to exchange the old-fashioned oak paneling with the starchy, clinical anonymity of the local grocery store. Coates could be suffocating. It tried so hard to be quaint and academic and literary that it came off like it was trying too hard. Diana preferred the supermarket’s cheap, bright appeal—at least it was honest. 

She looked out the window the whole ride back to campus, holding her plastic bag on her lap. Beside her, Staci took off her tennis shoes and replaced them with a pair of strappy sandals she’d picked up in the shoe aisle. “They were cheap,” she informed Diana in a way that implied she thought the shoes were a real steal. Diana fought back a grimace. _God, do these Coates girls have_ any _taste?_

For a minute, she thought of her friends back in middle school. They were cool by eighth grade standards, with their push-up bras and low-slung jeans, loitering outside school grounds after dark with shakily lit joints held between their fingers. That was before she was shipped off, though, to a school crammed full of kids who were delinquents or WASPs or both. 

Diana flicked a stray curl behind her ear, feeling gloomy and irritable. She was bored of Staci, found her more and more intolerable the longer she continued waxing on about her ugly, tacky shoes. _Shut up and get a tan,_ Diana thought as the campus van pulled up to the gates, and she swung her legs out of the van with hardly more than a goodbye.

Diana’s anger only intensified when she found her current roommate, named Giselle or Gina or something—Diana didn’t remember—studying on her side of the room, which was scrupulous and neat. “Can you study in the common room?” Diana snapped. _She’ll request a room change soon,_ she thought as what’s-her-name scurried out. That was good. The faster she did it, the faster Caine could visit.

Finally, the door clicked shut, and Diana was free to put away her purchases in peace. After, she opened the window by her unmade bed to air out the stuffy, vaguely body odor-ish smell her roommate left behind. She then sat at her vanity and checked the state of her face. _Passable,_ she thought, cocking her head. Caine might think she was pretty, but Diana’s standards were higher than that. She noticed every stray pimple, every frizzy strand of hair, every ugly human crease in her cheeks or forehead, and fixed it with enviable promptness. That was her way. If she did anything less, all of Coates’ female population would devour her—a bunch of eager, cackling hyenas attacking the lioness with a slight limp. She couldn’t let those bitches win. _They’re already so close._

Diana applied a fresh coat of lip gloss and stalked around her bedroom, feeling restless and jumpy and angry. She often felt this way, ever since coming to Coates. It was so unlike the sinuous, quiet anger that’d coiled in her since puberty, since her mothers’ boyfriends stopped looking at her mother and started looking at her—instead, it was bright and loud and unable to be sated unless she _did_ something. It was the same anger, Diana reasoned, that caused kids to freak out and shoplift after years of being straitlaced. It was like a spring that had been pressed down for too long, or the water in a kettle boiling. After years and years of straining to be quiet and keep safe, all the pent-up shit was liable to burst.

Her roommate— _Gabriela, that’s her name_ —kept a big bag of kettle corn in a box under her bed. Diana got to her knees and brought it out. She ate a handful before thinking of the calories and putting the box away, her anger temporarily extinguished. She wasn’t heavy by any means, of course—but you couldn’t be too careful.

At six, she met up with Caine in the lunch hall. “Is Drake coming?” she asked, putting down her tray at their regular table. 

“He’s in line,” he said, studying the tines of his fork.

Always the same question, always the same answer. Diana wasn’t expecting anything less. Caine was an expert at avoiding her gaze. She thought it was a little charming; it was always a pain when guys acted too eager. Not that it wasn’t obvious that he liked her, but at least he had enough decorum to be coy about it. 

Drake joined them. He didn’t look at Diana. This was something she tolerated. Hell, if he were an ordinary boy, it might be nice that he wasn’t attracted to her. But Drake wasn’t ordinary. _There’s something in his eyes,_ she thought, frowning. _Like he knows something I don’t._ The few times he did deign to look at her, it was in a strange, glittery-eyed way. Diana was used to predatory stares, but this was different. He reminded her a little of the middle-aged creeps she’d chat with over AIM when she was ten or eleven, the kind who’d send messages she at the time only vaguely realized were sexual. He had a half-lidded way of looking at her body that made her feel thoroughly out of control, uncomfortable, a stranger in her own skin. 

Dinner was a bore. Caine and Drake constantly alluded to telekinesis-related activities done while she was absent, their eyes lit up with excitement as they discussed their so-called “plans.” It soured her mood even further. She picked at her salad. She knew a late night frozen dinner heated up in the common room before lights’ out would ruin her already dysfunctional sleep schedule, but her appetite was utterly nil. Finally, she threw down her fork and picked up her tray, knowing this would get Caine’s attention. 

Right away, his head snapped up, eyes urgent. She felt a twinge of satisfaction. “I’m going to get dessert,” she said loftily. “Then I’m going to the spot.”

“The spot” was what they referred to the clearing behind the library as. In five minutes, Diana was immersed in the wooded clearing. Tree stumps were bright brown splotches on the dead autumn grass. She sat on one of them and ate a cup of orange sorbet. Nearby, a gaggle of girls giggled and talked, huddled together like a flock of plaid-skirted geese. Their hair was mousy brown and blonde, skin pallid.

Diana suddenly imagined what she might look like—sitting hunched over on a stump in the evening twilight, eating sorbet with a wooden spoon. Alone.

A wave of gloom washed over her. Suddenly, she missed Caine. No, that wasn’t it. She missed the girl friends she’d had in eighth grade. She was lonely. She stabbed her sorbet with her wooden spoon and stood up, self-conscious. She could feel the girls’ eyes on her, could practically hear the words they’d whisper once she was gone: _slut, witch, bitch._ With as much dignity as she could muster, she brushed the imaginary dust from the back of her skirt and stalked off back into the dining hall, nearly bumping into Caine and Drake.

“We were just looking for you,” Caine said. Drake just looked at her sullenly.

“Glad to see I’m such a priority.” Diana folded her arms. “So. What are we doing?”


End file.
